today I'm going to talk about the ketogenic diet intermittent fasting your
thyroid and your hair sometimes when people go on keto and they do in a min
fasting they may notice a loss of hair and they start getting cold some people
might even see an enlarged thyroid gland so there is a way to do it correctly
without having to lose your hair or have a thyroid problem so let's take a look
at a couple things vitamin A activates the thyroid
receptors okay in the thyroid gland itself so the pituitary gland which is a
tiny little gland in your brain sends a hormone down to the thyroid and it
controls the thyroid and this hormone is called thyroid stimulating hormone
connects to the thyroid little receptor and it has several functions one is that
it increases the size of the thyroid hormone number two it increases the
production of the thyroid hormones like t4 so low amounts of vitamin A inhibit
the receptors so you're not activating the receptors of the thyroid very much
so what's gonna happen is if you don't have this activation the receptors this
hormone is going to start going higher and higher and higher to try to connect
to make the thyroid work because there's also a feedback loop telling the
pituitary what to do so if we're not getting this feedback loop because it's
not connecting the pituitary we'll start to increase this hormone right here one
of the problems with that is that this thyroid can then start to enlarge okay
so it starts getting bigger but because it's not connecting that well you may
not have the quantity of thyroid hormones if you look in the mirror you
can kind of see if it's kind of swollen right there and then you also have a
decreased uptake of this hormone and this could be one of the reasons where
you're cold there's other reasons too that don't
involve the thyroid gland now the thyroid gland is not working correctly
one of the symptoms that you can experience is hair loss okay so you can
it be cold hair loss and large now the next question is could you be
deficient in vitamin A or not let's take a look at that
vitamin A comes from certain foods like eating liver egg yolks butter fish oils
as in cod liver oil and even certain leafy greens that can be converted into
the active form of vitamin A realize that the greens contain carotenoids
which is the precursor for retinol and the other thing you need to know is that
the conversion is really like 10% under certain conditions so you're not going
to make a lot of active vitamin A from consuming a lot of greens the other
thing you should know is that you may not be able to absorb vitamin A properly
if you have a fatty liver or you have cirrhosis of the liver or an inflamed
liver or you have a gallbladder problem or we have a missing gallbladder or you
don't have enough bile because you need bile to absorb this fat soluble vitamin
these are just reasons why you may show a problem with a vitamin A deficiency
because you're eating these but they're not being absorbed correctly now if you
have gastric bypass for example that could be another reason why you don't
absorb vitamin A because you have a now shortened small intestine also if you
have celiac or scar tissue in your colon or SIBO which is small intestinal
bacterial overgrowth pretty much anything going on with the small
intestine could create a vitamin A deficiency another symptom that you may
notice with vitamin A deficiency is a lack of vision at night when you're
driving so that's another little symptom the other problem with vitamin E
absorption is a lack of zinc and a lack of zinc is way more common than in
vitamin A deficiency why because we don't store zinc very effectively if
you're not actively consuming zinc on a regular basis you're going to be
deficient zinc is needed to transport vitamin A in to the thyroid zinc is also
needed in the production of thyroid hormone as well as the conversion of
t4 to t3 so this is another really important trace mineral and on top of
that if you're consuming no animal products let's say you're vegan or
you're consuming grains that's another way to become zinc deficient some of the
best foods that have good amounts of zinc shellfish fish in general and red
meat there's other foods but you're gonna get a lot of zinc from these foods
the other problem with zinc is if you have an intestinal problem or a liver
problem that could be another reason why you're not absorbing zinc so this goes
beyond just the diet let's say that you have a problem with the small intestine
because you have a history of antibiotics you can take more of zinc
and then that way you have enough because if it's not being absorbed you
can just take more and that just might give you what you need to offer this
conversion the other problem is maybe you're not consuming enough shellfish or
red meat or you're not having any of these well then you can just eat more of
the raw materials if you want more information about the thyroid gland
check out this video right here